Comic and Post Search

The Desolation of Tolkien

I was recently subjected to the latest installment of the Hobbit movie franchise by an individual who shall remain nameless, as I’m pretty sure they could be tried in court for this sort of thing (Liz!). Needless to say, I was not a fan of the film. Watching the first bits of The Desolation of Smaug, it seemed like the studio decided to spit on the concept, but a little over a third of the way in, it became clear that they’d simply lost half the pages in the novel and decided to make a bunch of things up rather than get themselves a fresh copy. I mean, who can blame them? Making awful film adapations of wonderful novels is a busy lifestyle, I’m sure.

Okay, so I’m being a little hyperbolic. The movie wasn’t really an atrocity if you take it as its own thing. Trumped up Hollywood crap certainly makes up a good portion of the film and quite bit of it seems to just be taken from someone’s fan fiction journal, but there are glimmers of the original writing in it and those moments are quite nice. Still, it’s a difficult thing to see a story you care quite a bit about mucked about with in such a way, especially when so many of the changes are utterly unnecessary. The scene mentioned in today’s strip, where the dwarves are headed down the river in their barrels, definitely springs to mind. All the bits with that one dwarf and the lady guard of the elves were also extremely goofy. Oh, and about 80% of those scenes with the CGI orcs…

I guess there was rather a lot I found unnecessary.

The pacing in the movie was probably the most awkward thing about it. The film’s creators seemed to rush through everything that was actually in the book and linger on all the unnecessary crap they decided to add to it. What was the deal with that?

All that said, Ian McKellan’s Gandalf was absolutely amazing, as usual, and was the only thing that made parts of the movie watchable. Most scenes only provoked an irritated buzzing in my brain that simply wouldn’t quit, a buzzing that was reduced noticeably whenever McKellan had some interesting bit of acting to do, thankfully. It was almost as if his presence anchored the movie. When the fellow disappeared, they suddenly found themselves with footage full of Legolas leaping around like a goddamn parkour champion while he kills orcs that were never supposed to be there in the first place.

Anyway, this blog turned into a bit of a rant and I apologize for that. Quite a lot of people seemed to enjoy the film so I’m probably in the minority but as a fan of the original work, it is difficult for me to keep quiet about it. The Hobbit, as many of you know, was one of the first books I ever read and was certainly the first novel I ever read and one that I’ve returned to many times. While it’s not a perfect story, it is a wonderful work with a lot of character and a lot of charm, one that really doesn’t need a lot of embellishment to make a good and exciting film.

There will be another comic on Friday, I’ve already got one written so prepare yourselves! We will be returning to the mythology well, as we should!

Related Comics ¬

Discussion (51) ¬

Oh, I’m in absolute agreement with you about this movie! I feel like they needed to fill 3 movies with something that “the masses” will be attracted to (not to sound snobbish, but I feel like the only reason to include Legolas was to bring back all the fangirls that were all over him last time around).

I felt like Sir McKellan seemed exhausted, but I’m not sure if I’m imagining it because of what he’s said in the interviews about filming The Hobbit. Though, of course, he’s phenomenal in every scene. I liked Beorn’s compound, and Thranduil was very otherwordly and eerily non-human (minus that weird scar that appeared when he lost his temper), which was great, but after the barrel scene, I felt that the movie abandoned any pretense of having common sense or of trying to follow the book.

Also, I’ve been following your comics for a long time, just never had a big enough reason to come out of my shell and comment. I absolutely love your art style and your sense of humor! Thank you for taking time to share your talent with us!

Your complaints are not hyperbolic at all! I completely agree with you. The movies just felt like they padded as much unnecessary stuff as possible, in order to make as many movies as possible, in order to make as much money as possible. As a result, the bits actually taken from the book are few and far between, and it’s not an especially long book to begin with! Argh.

Oh gods, the romance? I wanted to vomit. Not only was it stupid and unnecessary but it was just the corniest piece of cinema I think I’ve ever seen.

I also liked Ian McKellan but I mean…who doesn’t? Also apart from the really annoying bits I didn’t mind it but I think I’m only holding on to the fact that Benedict Cumberbatch did some of the best voice acting ever.

I don’t know, I think the book is not nearly as great as fans assume everyone thinks. It’s about an adventure, yes, but nothing more. It’s simply a “this happened, then that happened” affair with little in the way of meaning or character development. Granted, I feel the same about Lord of the Rings. Overall I’m not a fan of Tolkien’s writing style.

The movie, on the other hand, injected many of the attributes that the novel was missing. Suddenly we have action, romance, character development! I wish the Hobbit book was more like the movies. Tolkien was so in love with his world that he felt any little anecdote was automatically interesting. I feel that if a book like that were written today, it would be largely panned as an author writing about his personal fantasy without considering the basic necessities of writing an engaging novel.

And yes, I know, many people will disagree with this view–they grew up with Tolkien’s universe and have come to see everything in its light. I didn’t. I read the books when I was a teenager, a sci-fi fan who had already read great works by Asimov, Clarke, and Stephenson. I finally caved and started reading Tolkien. I understand how important it is in the development of the fantasy genre as we know it today, but that doesn’t mean the works really hold up as good writing. I don’t at all blame the studies for trying to make the stories more interesting.

Would you really watch a movie about how a hobbit and some dwarves said they were going to go to a place, and then went to that place? Because that’s basically the plot of the Hobbit. It was written for a younger audience than Lord of the Rings; it lacks a lot of the sophistication and complexity that an adult audience expects. It would be crazy for the studio not to spruce it up.

I think you need to re-read the books now that you are older.
You’ll discover there is a great deal of depth and sophistication to the story. It’s not just “there and back again.”
Bilbo changes as the story progresses, and that’s the main thing that Jackson missed in his bastardization of the work.
Yes, it is written for a younger audience. Tolkien wrote it as a bedtime story for his children. It later became the prequel for LotR, so he altered it more to fit in to the lore.

The only thing the movie “injected” into the work was modern day sensationalism, over-the-top action sequences, a fabricated romance and a great deal of attention-deficit-viewer instant gratification. None of which are needed if the creators really understood the books which they obviously do not.

Read the book again, as an adult, as I did recently, and you’ll see that the overarching plot is very world-changing. They dethrone the goblins, burn the wargs, rile up Beorn against the rest, kill the spiders, rile up the wood elves, find the dragon’s weakness (pride & anger) with riddles and theft instead of blows, unleash him for firey apocalyptic goodness upon laketown, betray the dragon slayers their due, bilbo betrays the dwarves, and then there is a war in which pretty much everyone takes part, including beorn, who is fearsome, eagles, goblins, wargs, men, and elves.

By the time Bilbo heads back to the shire, he does so leisurely and with just a few companions because the dark forces between the shire and the lonely mountain have been -decimated- and are no longer a threat.

”Would you really watch a movie about how a hobbit and some dwarves said they were going to go to a place, and then went to that place?”

Yes I would. My problem with your point is this: there is no real character development. There is just the Hollywood equivalent of it AKA 180 degree personality change in under a minute. The Hobbit was a children´s book and it was a good one. The LOTR trilogy was for adults.

I’m all for Hollywood indulgence, with their constant ridiculous action sequences and simple dialog. But this was not the place for it. We didn’t need the extended barrel scene (it seriously went on forever), or an elf making a crack about a dwarf’s dick (which would lead into a useless love triangle). It was a short, simple book. It didn’t need to be 3 movies long. It could have had the same joy, peacefulness, and excitement as a Ghilbi movie. I’m sad to think that we will probably never get an adaptation with that tone.

You know what I hated most of all? Bilbo was hardly even in it. The first one was watchable because it was mostly from his perspective. His personality, motivation, and character development drove the movie. In the sequel, he was basically a side character. What was this series called again?

Hell, this movie didn’t even have a main character. It was a bunch of Tolkien mythos held together by absolutely nothing.

Yes! I was pretty much the only one of my friends of this opinion. I waited so long for a Hobbit movie and then they messed it up so bad. Critics seemed to like that they made it more epic but hate the slapstick and the singing. They seem to forget it was a children’s novel.

Beorn wasn’t anything like I, or my fiance, imagined, either. It was just the icing on the cake because I rather enjoyed him in the books.

In large part, I don’t mind a lot of the changes made in the movies (ie: a female character!!!) But the absurdity of barrels out of bond had me rolling my eyes (between bouts of laughter at the slapstick affair)

I wasn’t too bothered by Legolas simply being there – after all, he really -would- have been there by the time the book took place, if Tolkien had given some of the other elves names and personalities.

But I do agree with everything else you said. The movie was pretty terrible, and ironically resulted in more of a snoozefest this way than it would have been if they had been more faithful to the book.

(Note: as I write this, I have seen “An Unexpected Journey” but not “The Desolation of Smaug.)

The Hobbit, as written, would not make a good movie. The pacing is quite slow. A few months ago, as I was reading the book to my preschooler, I imagined making such a movie. A lot of the charm in the book depends on how things are described and how they are perceived by the characters. In a movie, you cannot convey all that richness without a lot of voice-over – which doesn’t match the immediacy of the medium. A movie with too much voice-over and exposition loses the emotional immersion made possible by the visual-audio stimulus.

There are two approaches to fixing this: cut stuff out and modify the story a little to put in the connections that were lost (the approach from the 1970’s era animated feature) or make heavy modifications that allow more of the original material to be included without losing the audience (the approach taken by Jackson et. al.).

Both approaches will alter the original source-material and doing either is an act of creation in itself. However, if you’re lucky, the result captures enough of the original that those who love one can enjoy the other.

I enjoy watching adaptations of my favorite stories as works of art in themselves. Many times, if I just receive them as they are, I can learn things I didn’t understand in my reading and see what other people considered important, not just what happen to stick out to me. For example, after watching Jackson’s LoTR, I understood Boromir’s motivation better than I did in reading the book and I was much more impressed with the scale of the battle of Pelennor Fields. This was despite having read LoTR cover-to-cover-…to-cover-to-cover 5 times before seeing the movie and despite the disappearance of Tom Bombadil, my favorite character.

I will eventually see the desolation of Smaug and I hope to again learn to see a classic story in a new way by watching it.

@Evan: no character development? Are you trying to troll us? Bilbo seems a lot more “Tookish” at the end of the book than at the beginning. Thorin also seems to grow personally.

I’m gonna have to disagree on the movie. While I certainly thought many of the action scenes went on too long, I think that overall the expansion of the story (most of which wasn’t from someone’s fanfiction journal, as you put it, but rather from Tolkein’s own journals and letters, as well as the Silmarillion) enriches the world and story for people who haven’t read some of the more impenetrable material in the mythos.

I will agree that the romance seemed forced, a view also held by the actress, Evangeline Lilly, who agreed to take part in the movie only if there was no love triangle. They shot the whole thing with no love triangle, then brought her and the others back a few months later for “reshoots” and “minor new material” which just happened to include all the romantic lines. She was, as you’d imagine, very cross.

On the other hand, the orcs being CGI didn’t actually bother me at all, while it seems their very existence was troublesome to you. I imagine that’s just personal preference, because the fact that they were CGI barely even registered to me. It was good enough that they didn’t look awkward or unnatural, so I was able to ignore any strangenesses or inconsistencies for the sake of varied body shapes that would be prohibitive for human actors to portray.

Ultimately, an adaptation DOES need to change things, to better suit its medium. Like Evan stated above, a direct adaptation likely would have been pretty dull as a movie; even the LOTR trilogy got lots of jokes about “walking through New Zealand: the movie”, and there was a lot more “real” content there than in the hobbit. When going from book to movie, you really do have to capitalize on impressive views and action, because it’s what film handles best.

Oh, and if you think it was a poor choice to make Bard an actual character instead of a plot device who appears out of nowhere to kill the dragon with a deus ex machina, I don’t know what to tell you. XP

I actually understand why a lot of people enjoyed the movie and I totally agree that they had to add and change things to make a movie work, I just don’t really agree that it needed so much just to stretch it out over three films or that they felt the need to connect the films to the LotR movies so much with the orcs.

The one thing I did like was the changes to Bard, I think they could have made him a little bit more of a darker melancholy character, but overall that was a pretty reasonable adjustment, that’s the sort of adaptation that makes sense to me.

The connection with the orcs (and also the Necromancer) was all Tolkein. It’s all taken from an appendix from LotR which was about what Gandalf was doing whilst away from the party, and tying the two stories together. Jackson et all are just integrating it into the actual story of the Hobbit, rather than a hidden footnote.

Yeah I’m aware that some of this stuff is actually in supplemental materials created by Tolkien himself, just the way they chose to include it seemed extremely goofy to me. I don’t necessarily have an issue with that sort of stuff, just the way they handled it.

A friend of mine has also focused a lot on ranting about the barrel scene. I’m pretty neutral about that scene, but I agree with him on a lot of other things.

But the part that actually bothers me the most is how that shattered continuity to the point that Gandalf would have to be either a massively forgetful buffoon, an all-around idiot, or have lost memory. In what they have as the midpoint of The Hobbit, Gandalf knows a great deal about Sauron coming back and gathering armies, and seemed more than a little concerned that Bilbo “found something” in the caves (credit to McKellan, he does a great job at making Gandalf both friendly, helpful, and a tad goofy, and simultaneously smart as a whip and really scary when he wants to be). He doesn’t just know something’s up, he’s freaking witnessing it firsthand. And yet, about 60 years pass when all’s well, and when the first Lord of the Rings movie starts up, Gandalf knows of Bilbo’s ring but does not research it until later, he only has (strong) suspicions about the trouble that’s brewing, and he’s has difficulties convincing people about how much danger they’re in. He saw Sauron. Why did they do that when it breaks what was established? Nevermind how terrible and senseless that repeating into-fire-into-Sauron-into-fire effect there was.

I somewhat agree. I don’t think they needed to have 3 movies. 2 would have been plenty. It seems extremely excessive as it is, especially when you hold it up to the LOTR movies being 3 massive movies, one for each book. Although the extra scenes did give me an immersed feel, it felt like filler at the same time.
What I was really disappointed with was the scenes with Smaug. It’s been a while since I read the Hobbit, but I think that part lacked a bit of the banter that was in the the book. I mean, one of the great things about Bilbo was his wits to get out of a situation, and that sometimes required his words. Maybe I’m off there.
I also think that they wasted Benedict Cumberbatch’s talents in the film by modifying his voice. He has a grand voice on his own. It would have been fine as is.

It it really too bad, the first movie was good, and the extended edition was actually very good.

the part that really gets me, is not even that extremely award scene with the penis joke, because that scene could just be removed, but the entire pacing and all the changed content that can’t just be cut. If it had not been so fundamentally bad I would of had hope for some directors cut.

And movie three is lining up to be even worse. All that is left is a battle, and I am not sure how they are going to have a three hour battle.

A friend who knows my passion for all things Tolkien directed me to your site. I’m going to go back and look at your prior work. Very interesting, artistic and good writing. Refreshing compared to most content these days.

I could not agree with you more. I think there are many of us that are, sadly, in the minority regarding Jackson’s alteration of Tolkien’s works.
I was going to boycott Hobbit 2 and 3 because the first was so tragically disrespectful of the book, but curiosity got the better of my judgment. I completely regret seeing it.

LotR I learned to accept. It had major and minor flaws in abundance, BUT it captured the essence of the books and introduced Tolkien to a new generation. LotR was 80-90% accurate to the books.
Hobbit 1 was only 50% accurate to the books. Hobbit 2, 10-15% accurate at best.

I honestly tried to go in with an open mind, not compare it to the book and just accept it as a standalone movie.
Making Beorn into a foul-natured jerk irritated me. The barrel escape stunned me at the complete fabrication. The ONLY thing it had in common with the book was the barrels being in the river. When the dwarves fought Smaug, I nearly yelled aloud in the theater.

I’ll do my best to avoid the third one. I simply do not want New Line, Jackson or anyone associated with these to get any indication that people will pay to have literature stripped, re-dressed in Hollywood glam and put on display like a street walker. Plus I cannot fathom how killing Smaug, the battle of five armies and the journey home will take up three hours. Ugh!

While I agree that having Legolas jumping around like mad and making bad-arse shots like some crazy pro, I would like to point out that they did find many of Tolkien’s original notes for the book itself. For example, the necromancer and turning out to be Sauraman (I can never remember how to spell his name). Whether or not some of the thing between one of the dwarves and the elf-woman is actually part of the notes or just something Hollywood added themselves, I really don’t know. But all in all, I enjoyed the movie. Not as much as I love the book, but as it’s own thing, I liked it.

Hey, my first time commenting (I think) and I really love this comic. It’s been really informative about mythology and funny at the same time! A hard thing to accomplish, I expect. Great job, keep doing awesome comics please!

i wish you could get to talk about vampires a bit more… like… the diferences between vampires of diferent countries and stuff… or even better… how in just one country you can find lots of different kinds of vampires that does not seem to be to different between them, but those who know would notice the differences like… strigoi and moroi, or something like that…